Rudyard Kipling

Kipling was born in Bombay, torn from it at five for a wretched foster childhood in England, and returned at sixteen to work as a newspaperman in Lahore, where Plain Tales from the Hills made him famous across the English-speaking world by twenty-three.

The 1890s brought The Jungle Book, years in Vermont, and a run of stories and verse no contemporary matched for sheer command; Kim (1901) distilled everything he knew and loved of India. The Nobel came in 1907, when he was forty-one, the youngest winner then or since, and he repeatedly refused a knighthood and the laureateship.

His son John, whose army commission Kipling had pulled strings to secure, died at Loos in 1915; the grief runs under everything he wrote after. He died in 1936, his craft never in dispute, his imperial politics argued over ever since.